Monday, December 17, 2012

A Few Observations On School Shootings

Most teachers are women, and liberal women at that, and few of them have any experience with guns, or even want it. Many of them are rabidly anti-gun, in fact. Expecting them to train and carry guns to deter maniacs is a fool's desire.

Supposing, though, you did manage to persuade teachers (and school administrators and school lawyers) to carry guns: there's lots of details there to take care of. Do the teachers carry them on their persons, in holsters? In their purses? In a locked cabinet in the classroom? What happens if when a teacher has a negligent discharge? Or feels threatened by an unruly teen and throws down on him? If the guns are locked in the classroom 24/7, it makes a target for thieves.

Probably a better solution is what the airlines came up with in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist hijackings: making access to the cockpit impossible by "hardening" the access door. The same could be done for classrooms: metal doors with no windows, with a heavy metal bar on the inside to keep a gunman out and the kids/teacher safe within. Periodic drills to familiarize the staff and students with the necessity of getting inside the secure classrooms.

Limit access into and out of the school building itself with more hardened steel doors. If the school has a "resource officer" (read: cop), he should be stationed at the main entrance so as to monitor people arriving at the school.

My thought exactly...harden the perimeter. Supposedly the shooter "shot out the door" and gained entry to the school. I bet all he had to do was shoot the glass in the door, reach in and turn the door handle.How many school doors have glass in them? Any of you folks want to do something to stop senseless slaughter like this....make an appointment with the school principal and the janitor and do a survey of your kids school. Then convince the school board to "harden the perimeter".

About Me

What I'm Reading

Rolf Nelson: The Heretics of St. Possenti

Hitchens

The MSM

A newsroom comprised entirely of leftists/liberals is no more capable of ideological objectivity than an all-white newsroom would be of racial objectivity, or an all-male newsroom of gender objectivity.

FlickR

Captain Louis Renault

"Round Up the Usual Suspects."

The Drawn Cutlass Philosophy

Be as decent as you can. Don't believe without evidence. Treat things divine with marked respect, and don't have anything to do with them. Do not trust humanity without collateral security, it will play you some scurvy trick. Remember that it hurts no one to be treated as an enemy entitled to respect until he prove himself a friend worthy of affection. Cultivate a taste for distasteful truths. And, finally, most important of all, endeavor to see things as they are, not as they ought to be.

Ambrose Bierce

The Foe

When I am free to walk the streets of Mecca or Medina as the agnostic I am and receive nothing but curious glances, I will believe Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance.

Sign On. You Know You Want To.

A Few Words From Some Founding Fathers

Jeff Cooper's Rules of Gun Safety

All guns are always loaded. Even if they are not, treat them as if they are.

Never let the muzzle cover anything you are not willing to destroy. (For those who insist that this particular gun is unloaded, see Rule 1.)

Keep your finger off the trigger till your sights are on the target. This is the Golden Rule. Its violation is directly responsible for about 60 percent of inadvertent discharges.

Identify your target, and what is behind it. Never shoot at anything that you have not positively identified.

Bob's Addendum To Cooper's Rules

A Gun is not a Toy. Don't Play With It.

Bob's Theory of Hush Puppies

Bob's Theory of Hush Puppies: The best hush puppies are oblong shaped, rather like dog turds. The worst ones are spherical, like balls. The spherical ones are usually made from the recipe on a pre-packaged box of hush puppy mix.

Restaurant Ratings

My restaurant ratings, mostly intended for BBQ restaurants, will be on a 1-5 scale, with 1 being the worst and 5 being the best. Unlike most reviewers, I don't intend to play games with the rating scale by introducing fractions such as "2 and 1/2" or "4 and 3/4," I've always considered that stupid and a signal that the reviewer is trying to avoid making an honest 1-5 judgment.

Here is the breakdown of the ratings:

1 out of 5: waste of time, crap, unable to finish eating; apathy by staff/ownership

2 out of 5: edible, but no effort to impress; staff/management going through motions; desultory.

3 out of 5: average; reasonably good food, moderate effort by staff/management

On Self-Reliance

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."